The Valles Caldera National Preserve in the Jemez Mountains was set aside by Congress under the National Park Service in 2014, not only because of its important scientific interest and scenery, but because it is a rare high-altitude watershed that supports a wide variety of plants and animals and a rare ecology. In most of the mountains of the Southwest, similar landscapes are heavily damaged by livestock grazing to the point where their wildlife is greatly diminished and streams and rivers either no longer function or are reduced and polluted.
That is true of the lands surrounding the Valles Caldera in the Jemez Mountains. Most of the high-altitude West is managed by the US Forest Service which has allowed livestock grazing since the agency was formed around 1900. Over time, the livestock industry has become a powerful political force in Washington, and it has established cattle grazing on national forests and BLM lands as a dominate use of those lands, even in wilderness areas. Under the Trump administration, the Forest Service has been instructed to greatly increase livestock grazing and to restock areas that are unsuitable for cattle and areas which have been set aside for species and watershed protection, often after litigation.
For those reasons, the Valles Caldera is an increasingly important refugia for wildlife, plants and fisheries. Its status in the National Park System protects it from the industrial focus (oil, mining, logging) of many other public lands.
But over the last decade some ranchers on the north side of the Valles Caldera National Preserve have been cutting the fence and pushing cattle into the Preserve, which is closed to grazing. The National Park Service has reacted by fining the ranchers and requiring them to retrieve their impounded cattle. Meanwhile three conservation groups have taken legal action against the US Forest Service to force them to pay attention to the trespass problem caused by the ranchers they allow to graze on Santa Fe National Forest land.
Some ranchers who graze on public lands in the West can be quite militant about what they see as a right, not the privilege to graze cattle on American public lands. This anti-regulation movement engaged in violent uprisings at what is now the Gold Butte National Monument in Nevada in 2014 and at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016. That national right-wing movement has festered on the fringes of Western society for decades until Donald Trump hired some of its members to staff his Interior Department in 2025.
In northern New Mexico the anti-federal, anti-regulation movement has a different flavor. Here some Hispano ranchers in rural northern New Mexico question the legitimacy of federal land management agencies because they claim that some federal land was contained in land grants given to their ancestors by the governments of Spain and Mexico before the War with Mexico in 1847. (Those land grant lands were taken from Pueblo people by force in the early 1600s.) In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago with Mexico that ended that war, the US said it would honor land grants, but those land grants were largely taken from the Spanish descents by various lawyers and schemers in the late 1800s (see the Santa Fe Ring). When the National Forests were formed in 1903, the high country of New Mexico and all the other western states became various national forests, to be owned by all Americans and managed on their behalf by federal land management agencies. The Spanish land grant claimants have the same rights as all other Americans to use those lands, and they get below cost grazing on national forest lands as do all other ranchers in the West.
The War with Mexico did not stop when the Treaty was signed in 1848 and violence continued for years in northern New Mexico. In 1967 a violent event happened when land grant activists took over the Rio Arriba County Courthouse in Tierra Amarilla and a Forest Service Campground at Echo Amphitheater. Arrests quelled that event, but some ranchers continue to reject federal management and sympathize with the larger anti-federal movement in the West. Some of the most militant of those northern ranchers have a grazing allotment that borders the Valles Caldera National Preserve on the north boundary of the Preserve.
Recently, Trump has hired some stridently anti-federal people to the Interior Department including a woman named Karen Budd Falen, a lawyer who has been representing ranchers in their confrontations with federal agencies when those agencies try to regulate their commercial grazing activities. She also owns ranches in Wyoming, Utah and Nevada that have federal allotments. She has been outspoken in her views that ranchers should not face conservation regulation on public lands and that public lands should be transferred to industry ownership. Now she is rewriting federal regulations that could directly benefit her ranching operations.
In New Mexico she has been working with a lawyer named Tom Patterson, a rancher with anti-federal views. Together they have been trying to hamstring the Mexican wolf reintroduction program in New Mexico. Tom Patterson is also the President of the Northern New Mexico Stockgrowers Association and some of the ranchers who own trespass cattle at the Valles Caldera are members of the NNSGA.
The concern is that Karn Budd Falen could focus on the legal problems the Forest Service is having with environmentalists working to block cattle trespass at the Valles Caldera and protect wildlife from cattle. Though this is a minor problem in the grand scheme of the Interior Department, Budd Falen’s friendship with Tom Patterson could lead to problems at the Valles Caldera if she intervenes on behalf of the offending ranchers. A big if.
Budd Falen has directed a radical rewrite of Bureau of Land Management livestock grazing regulations that cuts the public out of decision making and exempts all public land cattle grazing from environmental law compliance. Her proposed regulations violate numerous laws, but she is pushing them forward anyway. Forest Service grazing regulations are likely to mimic the new BLM regulations.
Overall, cattle grazing is highly destructive to arid public lands like the high country of the Jemez Mountains. Cattle trample streambanks and destroy woody vegetation by streams which can cause streams to dry up and water tables to drop. They overgraze vegetation and compact soils leading to big losses of diversity of plants, insects and larger wildlife species over large areas. They contaminate streams and fill meadows with their feces.
Thus, regulating and removing cattle from mountain watersheds protects the larger public interest. Restoring plant communities and restoring willows and cottonwood near streams protects fish populations and increases the amount of water in streams and rivers. More grass and other vegetation means more deer and elk and many other mammals, insects and birds. Visit the Valles Caldera to see what a landscape recovering from past grazing abuse can look like with healthy streams and grasslands.
Tom Ribe
